Raw Food Recipes. Raw Foods. Dehydrating Mushrooms.

Mushroom, fungi, spores, some woody, some meaty, yet all have a large water content that defines their unique texture.  Another perfect item to explore when playing with raw food.  My only thoughts of raw shrooms is when your crafty waitress brings you a house salad with sliced raw button mushrooms.  Thanks, I will pass!

In order to extract optimal flavor in mushrooms they need to have  heat added to them, this creates a problem in the raw food scenario.  Ah yes, dehydration!  I marinated the generic shrooms in organic soy (just a little), shallots, chili flakes, and sesame oil.  They sat for 4 hours then off they went into the food dehydrator!  12 hours later we had moist flavorful shrooms!  These were used to add flavor packed punches in all kinds of raw dishes and as a tasty snack.

Butternut Squash Raw Food. Vegan Recipe and Culinary Creativity Meet.

Reaching deep into the depths of my knowledge of flavor profiles I  decide to push a few  culinary boundaries with Raw Food recipes. Butternut Squash was the medium to create a new recipe platform.  Recently I was reading that you could eat it raw and it carried outstanding nutritious properties.  Hmmm, the mind was doing circles, I had to experiment with butternut squash, were these vegan’s on to something?

First things first, I large diced a vibrant colored butternut squash and handed out a few pieces to some other chef friends (as they looked at me as if I had lost my mind)!  We all bit into our pieces, and the moment of silence was shocking.  With a combined 58 years of cooking knowledge not one of us had experienced RAW butternut squash.  The flavor (we all concluded) was a cross between sweet potato and apple.  This launched a excellent dialog and brain storming session!

Butternut-Papaya Squash Soup

(see below for the recipe we put together)

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Raw Food Snacks

For me, it is not about writing on  meaningless topics & nonsense (especially critiquing restaurants) .. it’s about sharing things that have expanded my knowledge, inspired my creativity, or bring back an emotional tie.  In addition, educating others from my experiences is my goal-whatever the topic may be.

My ultimate goal is to inspire others to–TRAVEL. COOK. & EAT.

“Un-cooked” madness-

After 2 days of nipping at raw seeds and nuts, I realized I needed to put together some “snacks”.. this being a bit challenging because most people grab the box of wheat thins and kick back in front of the tube…  Not this week—it was all about that wonderful food I was set out to create all with the wonderful and challenging factor of that magic 120 degree mark!

Some of the snacks that were basic and fairly tasty were…

Cinnamon and nutmeg dehydrated banana chips (make sure to use raw bananas!), papaya chips, Asian marinated beef jerky (which turned out more like crackers…) I was a big fan, but had mixed reviews from the co-pilot.

The preparation time for each item took between 24-36 hours.… tisk tisk.. there is no question I should have started preparing these items in advance.

Raw Food. Rules & Guidelines of Raw Foods Experiment

After years of pondering what would it be like to only eat RAW food I decided to take the challenge… I did not do this for the trendy diet/cleansing aspect but for the culinary challenge. After a little convincing and flattery I somehow managed to get a co-pilot for this experiment! (ahh, the art of flattery…)

We decided that for one week we would taste, “un”-cook, and design new ideas that could potentially turn the thought of RAW food into something palatable.

When l used to live in Santa Monica, CA I ate at Juliano’s RAW, the food was creative, tasty in its own right, and no question vibrant. I was blown away when I ate at Bliss Café and Elixir Bar in Dallas- we couldn’t figure out how we were so full after eating hardly anything… it was a topic of conversation for weeks, so finally I made the call that we were going to go RAW!

Most Raw diets and RAW chefs stick to the vegan realm but not these omnivores!

Some of the general guidelines we had to follow were-

No food item could be heated above 120 degrees

No dairy (as commonly pasteurized)

Organic produce and grains

That said I quickly realized that my two new best friends became the blender and food dehydrator.

***Two books that are a great guideline for inspiration, reference are Charlie Trotter’s RAW and Juliano’s RAW